


PROJECT TITAN

by themissinglenk



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Biopunk, Dystopian, M/M, Multi, ipoophere, project titan, smells a little like blade runner
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-23
Updated: 2013-10-23
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:30:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themissinglenk/pseuds/themissinglenk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"2015--the streets are lined with dirt and the people are starving. The city is surrounded by walls. Former soldiers of the corrupt military have broken off to form their own underground rebellion against the government's top secret project: PROJECT TITAN. Humans are being experimented on in an attempt to create new weapons of war. While information is limited, they have managed to obtain one of the missing test subjects... Eren Jaeger." // AU, drabble (and possibly longer fic) based on a lovely fanart, link in notes</p>
            </blockquote>





	PROJECT TITAN

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [PROJECT TITAN](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/29590) by ipoophere. 



_un_

* * *

Pain.

That was the last thing he remembered. Pain, cold and white and all-encompassing. Like no pain he’d ever felt before. Clamping its steely grip on his muscles, all the pressure of the universe throbbing in his ears, pain chewing on each and every nerve. _Chewing._ Something was chewing on him whole, waves of pain as jaws opened and closed, and the only relief was the hope of being fucking swallowed because then at least the blackness would be a peaceful void—

But then Eren woke up, and he woke up with one primal urge lighting the marquees inside his head:

 _Run_.

 _Run_ , his father had said. _Take the key and run. Get away from here. Get far away, far away, don’t let them catch you but if they do, don’t give up. Fight. Run._

Eren Jaeger stood on shaking knees, weak and wobbly as a newborn colt. He choked on a breath; it fell in a little cloud from his lips on the cold. It wasn’t raining so much as it was misting, dropping a silvery veneer over the slate and brick and gritty concrete. He was in an alley and he wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there. The anonymity, the confusion—it was vaguely familiar. This had happened to him before. This was nostalgic, almost. If that was the appropriate word. Once, he’d been playing outside. He’d fallen. He’d hit his head. He’d woken up alone and sore past dinner with a concussion and his mom had cried and laughed and yelled at him all at the same time, because he hadn’t come home on time and she’d been worried, so worried, lost children were never found these days—

 _Run_.

It was one with his pulse.

 _Run_.

Beat went the heart; whisper went the soul. _Run. Run. Run._ Every fiber of his being was cold and sharpened to a point of desperation, of instinct, and he felt raw and empty and charged with a purpose but there was no name or definition for it.

 _Run_.

From one end of the alley, a cluster of orphans with their little bouquets of rat tails gawked. From the other end, a pharmer lurked in the shadows, briefly distracted from the orphans by Eren. It was odd, feeling stiff and sick and yet vitalized. He wasn’t tired; just bone-deep _sore_. Eren started to run.  

 _Run._ When he ran, something shifted under his shirt. Awkward. Startling. It was a key, the key he wore around his throat with the little Orthodox cross his mother had given him. Fucking—ugh, why? Why did this feel familiar, too? Questions without answers? Or were they answers to questions he just needed to remember?

  
_Glorious twelve, children of Oceanus, descendants of Hyperion, offspring of Coeus, those begotten of Iapetus and Crius_ —

It was starting to come back to him. Slowly, like voices out of radio static or streetlights emerging from a thick maritime fog. Ah, the beach. He felt like he’d been to the beach recently. He wanted to go back and dig his toes into the cold soggy sand and let the freezing kiss of the tide roll up and nibble at his ankles while ——— watched from a beached and petrified trunk over his shoulder.

_Run, boy. Don’t stop running._

* * *

  _p_ _relude:_  
 _deux_  


* * *

“And I say again, yesterday and today and tomorrow in turn, if you believe in the sins of mankind, then you _must_ believe in the just punishments! And if you believe in the goodness of mankind, then you _must_ accept an inevitable divinity! And if you devote yourselves to an undue government, you are enslaving yourselves to demons with agendas of unnatural alteration of the world that is our gift, our kingdom, our right by birth, and if you let yourself be fooled, you are guilty of a conscious transgression and that sin is _ignorance_ and _ignorance_ is the phosphorous of the soul and can only be cleansed by the baths of brimstone in eternal subjugation, eternal damnation!”

They watched from the rooftops, where bounty scouts and ex-military rebels belonged.

Auruo snorted a good wad of bloody phlegm and spit somewhere off the roof in the general direction of the Wallists. Levi’s lip curled.

“You’re disgusting,” he remarked.

“Bloody again,” Petra added. “You should really get that checked out!”

“ _They’re_ disgusting, those street corner sermons and the idiots who flock to listen,” Auruo argued. “Doctors are disgusting, too. Can’t trust ’em.” Auruo sought out Levi’s sullen scowl. “Those Goddamn Wallist fanatics are everywhere now. It was much easier to pretend they didn’t exist when they stayed inside all day.”

Levi didn’t reply. Auruo was just the sort of man who liked to hear himself talk; he knew as well as the next trained man it was how the Wallist leaders maintained their flocks. Let the ruling sinful tyrants pay you good money under the table for spying on citizens, then turn around to the soapbox and get the unknowing citizens all riled up again at the injustice of it all. Wasn’t it great, the way secrets and alliances twisted and turned past the red tape and hacked security feeds? In the end, wasn’t everyone just out for themselves and themselves alone?

Levi wasn’t afraid. He knew how the system worked. The MP and the Garrison patrolled the streets like hungry dogs loose from their leashes, poorly trained and guilty of more hate crimes than real policing, while the real men in authority communicated via satellite streams and eerie timed broadcasts, the whole song and dance where anonymity and threat were more powerful than actual force. The government’s most important men were preoccupied, anyway. Why waste them on the decaying streets?

Bells tolled. School was out. Time to get the hell out of Dodge—rather, the metropolis’s Stohess Central District. Look at all those brainwashed kids, as good as the _Hitlerjugend_ of lore. Hordes of children in school sweaters and unscathed smiles. Well, most of them. Some of the older ones looked bitter and jaded, worn-out and rebellious souls. Levi didn’t pity them. He pitied the happy ones. The stupid ones. He’d never been happy and stupid. He’d been foul-mouthed and dark, scraped knees and busted lip, and bruised knuckles from the teacher’s smacks when he argued the bullshit politics and world history they shoved down the throats of preteens, desperate to break their souls before they started questioning everything in that formative window of growing up where suddenly the veil of childhood is ripped away and the world is revealed as the gray, desolate, dilapidated circus that it truly is.

No, Levi had never been like those happy stupid children holding hands and singing fairy tales. He’d been like _that_ one, the one who obviously stood no chance against the bullies but still put up an insolent fight. He’d been like _that_ one, radiating hatred for the world at large. Reality was on the horizon for those kids; they were nearing the end of secondary school and only the rich and the influential (or the terribly crafty) went to university anymore.

For everyone else, there was the 104th.

Erwin was already there by the time Levi and his men rolled in. The forgotten basement of Stohess’s Mental Hospital was a great headquarters. The computer systems didn’t know the difference between stolen identity and real identity; the computer systems didn’t _know_ things, after all. They were tight and efficient strings of mathematical equations created by man and if you outsmarted that man, well, the computer systems were painless to manipulate. Passcode: _g o o d b o y_. Identification card with the bars and numbers of hacking geniuses. _Click_. Red to green. There was a mechanical sigh as the bolts released on the doors. “Welcome, sires,” the soft and womanly automated voice greeted.

The air was thick with a sense of urgency. The lights from computer screens cast a glowing shade of blue to the dim rooms. Erwin and Hanji looked up tensely, but without fear. They knew who had come to join them; it was Hanji who’d distributed the identification cards, anyway. Ah, what a sight, a rebellious military scientist working undercover with an ex-Commander. The looks on their faces were cold and edgy. Levi didn’t even have to ask. But ask he did.

“What now?”

“They’ve lost another test subject,” Hanji confessed.

The urgency sharpened to a point.

“You mean _you’ve_ lost another test subject,” Levi hissed. “It’s _your_ department. You’re a director of research, Hanji!” Pause for breath. Hanji knew he didn’t actually blame her. “What do you mean they’ve _lost_ a test subject—what do you mean _another_?”

“That’s three so far in the past two years,” Erwin added under his breath, ignoring Levi’s damning scowl. “But while the other two haven’t been located, they’ve yet to show themselves, either. They’ve just…naturalized, basically. Faded into society.”

“Unless that was their intentions to begin with, and something’s going on that I’m not aware of,” Hanji replied grimly. “That’s a whole other basket of worms, though.”

“ _Can_ ,” Gunther interjected. “ _Can_ of worms.”

“It’s a ticking time bomb,” Hanji whispered. “The other two to go missing were essentially finessed, but this time… This one’s a Rogue. He’s still a danger to himself, too. Either he pops up on the radar, or—”

“Or _they_ storm the city in another Kristallnacht to find it,” Erwin finished for her, and the way he wouldn’t look any of them in the eye—oh, Levi knew that gravitas. He knew it all too well. How fierce and dead the shifting computer lights made Erwin look didn’t sit well with him.

“I don’t understand!” Levi snapped. “How the fuck do you _lose_ a test subject?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Hanji mumbled.

“Leave her alone, Levi,” Erwin husked, cutting a dark glance Levi’s direction. “That’s not important—yet. What’s imperative is that we find that missing test subject before they do, or anyone else.”

“Well, is there a bounty out for it?” Erd pressed, well aware of how their day jobs worked to their benefit.

“No. Not yet, at least,” Hanji murmured dryly. And really, Levi didn’t like the broken and browbeaten look on her any more than he liked the steely unfeeling flash in Erwin’s eyes, and he certainly didn’t like still feeling vaguely out of the loop, either.  

“They might hesitate with registering a bounty on him to prevent broadcasting their mistake, or they might register a bounty with as little details revealed as possible and use public awareness as a weapon,” Hanji continued. “To be honest, after what happened with Sawney and Bean…”

“And what’ll we do if we find it?” Auruo barked. “Babysit it?”

The glow of the computers reflected off Hanji’s glasses as she whipped around, pinning Auruo with a wide-eyed and pointed look. Her mad scientist eyes, Levi lovingly thought of them.

“No,” she insisted. “He’ll be mine. He was supposed to be mine in the first place, but Nile stole him!”

“Enough.” Erwin stood a little straighter; it was hard to imagine all those holsters and secret weapons would be so well hidden once he donned that elegant coat again. “One step at a time. This isn’t a scouting spree or data tracking, or even meddling with the press. This is direct and willful interference with classified military operations and we’re not going to get ahead of ourselves. Do you all understand?”

Murmurs of agreement. Nods of obedience. Salutes in submissive eye contact.

But Levi wasn’t stupid.

In all honesty, he was sort of thrilled. A _real_ project. A _real_ mission. Thank God. He’d been so restless and bored, only really getting his rocks off when using those identification hacks or lying awake at night wondering when the government would start installing eagle eyes in residential households instead of just street corners and important public businesses. But tiny throbs of panic and paranoia were nothing compared to this breath of fresh exhilaration. _Danger_. He had a lust for danger. It made him feel really alive.

Lusting after danger, however, did not make one an _idiot_.

“Hanji,” Levi husked, leaning over her shoulder once it was just the two of them for a moment or two. She smelled like cold sterile offices and sweet rosewater. “You say ‘him’ instead of ‘it.’ Did you know that?”

Hanji looked at him over her shoulder, eyes wide and lips parted as if the thought had stopped at her tongue. This wasn’t her mad scientist look; no, this one was strikingly more soft and innocent. Girlish, almost. Would have been the full package if accompanied by an embarrassed blush. She took a moment to tie her hair up in a ponytail before responding.

“Yes,” she confessed, with a guilty little glee flashing in her eyes. “I’m well aware of that, sir. I like to insist it’s my madman’s compassion.”   

* * *

_prelude:  
trois_

* * *

Heat rose, and the cold couldn’t invade here, not in Utopia’s Zhiganshina District where the streets were gridded haphazardly and the buildings were stacked tight and narrow, and so in the third-floor flat above Shanghai Xia Ojie, it was almost uncomfortably warm. Mikasa had the window open.

A cacophony of sounds muddled the echo of the television: children, some shrieking and laughing in the streets with their jacks and toy dragons, others selling flowers on the corners; beggars and pharmers and crazies, arguing with the Garrison; businessmen and lowlives alike breaking bread in the noisy cafés that lined the streets; mothers yelling at vagrant sons with too many tattoos and not enough time clocked in at the family Laundromat; shady business deals going down in the crooked alleys. Such a violent, loud, callous and merciless world here, a culture all strict tradition and desolation.

Mikasa stretched for the remote, turning up the volume on the television. Unlike the mindless folks down below going about their filthy lives in ignorance, Rapunzel in her tower here was actually interested in this particular broadcast before Mozi or Jun Qing interrupted her like they always did. “Sweet princess, delicate flower,” all their ridiculous flattery and bowing without lowering their greedy eyes, and: “Brother wants to see you, princess, he’s got something to talk with you about, and don’t forget the tea, kitten.”

Mikasa never forgot the tea. She never forgot the black ball of opium or the little pipe, either, carrying one in each hand like the great goddess of justice as she drifted into Brother’s office, bare feet tapping on the tatami mats, silk whispering on her skin. What did the other girls think of her? She failed to care. They looked like sluts and Halloween geishas, and she was real royalty, lounging about upstairs in panties and a cami, and this lovely embroidered silk banyan that was more like a boyfriend’s giant T-shirt than a robe.

“Mikasa, I have a job for you…” “Mikasa, I’m taking the day off, you’ll run the place for me, won’t you?” “Mikasa, I want you to serve the tea when I meet with my associates tonight…” Of course, Brother, the richest most soothing tea in the cupboards, on the shelf above the pharmers’ bricks, with a little dash of rat poisoning.

Cigarette smoke curled like a ribbon dance from her left hand as with her right Mikasa fought to scribble down in her journal as neatly as she could everything noteworthy from the television segment.

“Another one found under the ruins of Pompeii, a skull absolutely massive in diameter, enough evidence alone to suggest the rest of the remains—once uncovered—could be of a humanoid skeleton measuring almost _eleven meters_ in length! In conjunction with the paintings found on the walls of the catacombs under Pompeii, where these skeletal remains are currently being excavated, it feels rather mythical… Who are these giants? The Nephilim? The Titans—”

The lights went out. It didn’t bother Mikasa much; she had candles and lanterns lit in the corners instead of the lamps this afternoon. But it was all the electricity stuttering off—which, unfortunately, included the television set.

“Are you fucking kidding me!” Mikasa hissed, throwing the remote across the little apartment.

Shouts of surprise drifted up from the lower floors. Similar cries echoed from the streets, a real roar of tangled voices and complaints, layered thick over the commands of Garrison on post ordering the masses to calm down. Idiots, you’re in Zhiganshina. You had better luck telling the blackbirds not to fly.

It was a very minor blackout. Within seconds everything was up and running again. But when the television flipped back on, it was to a government transmission.

Black, stark black, with that awful glow. Blocky letters dancing across the void as a soft and womanly monotone narrated:

“ _We apologize for the inconvenience. This is a regular red warning test. We have been in a red warning constant attack alert for—FIFTY-SEVEN—WEEKS—TWO—DAYS—THREE—HOURS—NINE—MINUTES—AND—FIFTY-TWO—SECONDS—due to our endeavors for unification and widespread peace outside the walls. However, rest assured you are safe in the metropolis. Please pay your taxes. PROJECT TITAN thanks you._ ”

Flash of the PROJECT TITAN emblem, a rather masculine and daunting delineation of a human-like face, all strong jaw and glaring eyes. Like you’d peeled someone’s skin off to reveal this glowing white glower beneath it.

Mikasa had always found it an utterly whacky balance of power. It felt like the scientists were running the government, and the military and officials were just guard dogs of the Inner District and all its formal secrecy. Someone was hiding something and they were burying it in jacked-up taxes.

The television went back to normal. The segment on Pompeii was done. “Damn it!” Mikasa whispered, frowning softly as she rolled her pen back and forth between her knuckles.

_Clatta-thunk-BAM!_

Mikasa jumped, dropping her cigarette in the ashtray. Eyes wide and a cold vigilant readiness shooting nerve to nerve, she turned around to the open window. It was like something had fallen on the fire escape outside—or, apparently, _someone_.

Gawking at her from the fire escape as she stared from the center of the room was a young man. Dark hair, piercing eyes, panting hard like the fire escape was a pit stop on a grueling sprint. Running from rampsmen, maybe? Or the MP? His chest rolled under his white scrubs. There was a scattering of blood across the collar; made sense because it looked like the boy’s nose had bled recently. There were bruises along his forearms and a shredded piece of medical tape hanging off his left knuckles. A madman—an escaped convict, perhaps—whatever he was, he just did not belong there in Zhiganshina, let alone her _fire escape_ —but he just stood there, gasping for breath, and staring at Mikasa with this wide-eyed look of empty confusion.

Behind her, the television squawked.

Deep inside, her heart lurched and there seemed to echo the subtle _click_ of fate.

Mikasa hurried to the window and opened it further. The way he choked on his breath gave her shivers. Again they both fell still and silent, staring at each other in the same owl-eyed fashion, like they both knew better than to trust strangers—or anyone, for that matter—but for some awful reason in that moment, trusted no one else but each other.

“Come inside,” Mikasa whispered. “Come inside and have a smoke and some tea, for Christ’s sake.”

“Christ?” the boy husked, climbing in the window. His hands shook. _He_ shook, head to toe. He managed to make it look like he’d meant to crumble down into the throne of pillows on the divan. He shook his head, meeting Mikasa’s eyes. “I’ve seen Christ,” he whispered, “and I’ve seen the nails they put in Him.”

Madman. Most definitely a madman. Mikasa threw a lighter and a cigarette the boy’s way and hurried to pour a cup of tea for him. “Who are you?” she braved, though she longed to hesitate.

The boy took the tea like it was an offering of gold. He looked up at her through the steam and Mikasa’s heart ached. God, he was as young as she was, maybe—

“Eren,” the boy mumbled. “My name is Eren Jaeger.”

* * *

_PROJECT TITAN thanks you for your cooperation. Please pay your taxes. I mean—To be continued…_

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer. i’m sorry, i saw ipoophere’s fanart and i couldn’t resist. i have a problem okay? lol
> 
> for now just a drabble, experimentation. may or may not have chapters added.


End file.
